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Hire a Memoir Author On A Budget
“Dad’s birthday is coming up and I don’t know what to get him,” the voice said. “I thought maybe the perfect gift would be to hire a memoir author.” A memoir is certainly the gift for the person who has everything, who seems to need nothing. It is the ultimate gift. Most of the memoirs…
Read More September 6, 2012“We left Dad’s memoir at the nurse’s station”
When Tip Tyler was under nurse’s care in the last two weeks of his 94 years of life, his son found a new use for the book I wrote about Tip. “We left the book you wrote about Dad at the nurse’s station,” Steve told me. “They had a great time reading it and seeing…
Read More August 24, 2012How To Hire a Memoir Writer or Biographer — Tips
Before you hire a memoir writer or biographer, educate yourself. These FAQs will help you gauge labor and set goals in hiring a writer. There are different types of writers— biographer, ghostwriter, memoir writer —after you know what you want, then you are in a position to hire a memoir writer or personal biographer. 1….
Read More July 30, 2012
First Person vs Third Person in a Memoir
I’ve spent seven days hip-to-hip with my client here in Memphis along the slow-moving Mississippi and throughout this great city. This morning, as I prepare to accompany her to her beloved Nazarene church in North Memphis, I realize that I now have my client’s voice “in” me. Walking by the river as a pair of…
Read More July 22, 2012What to Avoid in Working With Graphic Artists
“I am only paying $4 book to print my book,” the first-time author said to me. “Wow! That is fantastic,” I told her. “For how many copies? How many do you print at a time?” “As many or as few as I want,” she said. “And how about your design costs?” I asked. “Oh, well…”…
Read More June 2, 2012Memory and Emotional Trauma
Getting my memoir client, H, to talk about March, 1945 is not easy. She lived through the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945. “Those three hours went very quickly,” she says, in our initial interviews. “We lost the whole house. It worked out fine, really. Nobody was really hurt or burned in our family.” It is…
Read More May 25, 2012When Memory and History Collide
In writing biographies, I always unearth places where the client’s memory collides with written history, and in that intersection we discover more of the truth of what happened. Often, a person’s recollections of World War II add new details to what has been written in history books. That is why writing memoirs is my great…
Read More May 11, 2012e-Book vs Paperback: Cost Comparison
The Excel spreadsheet made it all clear. My client’s husband had spent hours pulling together cost comparisons for publishing his wife’s nonfiction book. We already knew she would release an e-book version because that’s a no-brainer: once you have the book designed in a PDF, any good designer or publishing service can turn the PDF…
Read More May 8, 2012What A Woman From the 1930s Has to Teach Us
This morning I am working on Helga’s biography. We tend to think that we have hard times, whatever times we are living in. But read what my client went through as a ten-year-old German girl living in Tokyo in 1935. In many ways she led a privileged life, but check out her journey to get…
Read More April 6, 2012Disappearing Inventory
In trying to locate inventory from the first publisher of the singer-songwriter’s book, we learned today that they no longer have any copies in the warehouse. Of the number printed and the number sold, we knew that 6,000 books should be left somewhere. The author hoped that someone would call her to ask if she wanted…
Read More March 7, 2012